(The Daily Mail newspaper) These chilling pictures inside newly-liberated eastern Mosul show the bodies of dead ISIS fighters laying rotting in the streets.

On the banks of the Tigris River, just 600 metres from active ISIS positions, waste water trickles around a militant’s corpse, lying rotting in a sewage outlet.

He was one of many killed by Iraq’s Special Forces as they advanced through rural suburbs towards the riverbank, forcing ISIS fighters to flee by boat across the Tigris to western Mosul – the other half of the city still occupied by ISIS.

In a nearby field, a soldier points out chickens pecking over a bloated and bloodied ISIS soldier.

‘They are hungry because the farmers left when the fighting started and they have no food,’ he said. ‘But those chickens are eating ISIS and then someone will eat them. It’s disgusting. I’ve stopped eating chicken.’

Across the city, its normally emaciated wild dogs look healthier as they are living on a diet of dead extremists.

In one district where many buildings were reduced to rubble by coalition airstrikes, a litter of plump puppies waddle around the grounds of a bombed-out mosque, metres from two decomposing corpses.

Torn-open wounds on the bodies show the puppies have been eating the head and face of one militant and the abdomen of the man next to him.
‘Let the dogs eat them, we don’t care. Actually, we feel quite happy when we see dogs eating terrorists,’ said army soldier Khalid.

‘This is a normal death for every terrorist who comes to Iraq – they will be eaten by dogs.’

He insisted responsibility to remove the corpses is down to the council, rather than the army.

‘They’ve been there over a week,’ one resident told MailOnline. ‘Their car was targeted by a helicopter, so they escaped and ran towards that mosque, but then the aircraft bombed it and killed them.’

Khalid claimed the mosque was being used as an ISIS base, where it was rumoured ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had preached.